As you might be able to tell from my recent post about the movie ‘Ratatouille’, food – the procurement, cooking and consuming thereof – is one of my abiding passions. Before my recent trip to Singapore, I therefore invested a fair amount of time researching the city’s dining options.

Hawker centres, it seemed, are the city’s culinary hotbed – collections of independent stalls, each specialising in a particular dish or two. The Lobby, Starwood hotels’ blog, passed on an interesting perspective:

Singapore’s Ministry of Health rates restaurants on an A-D scale not on their quality but on their cleanliness. Oddly, the rating you want to watch for is C, not A, according to Serious Eats.

“Here’s the local logic: Being generally one-man outfits, if the hawker’s food were any good, he would be flat out busy taking orders, cooking, serving, collecting payment, and doling out change. Where would he find time to clean the stall to the obsessively nit-picky standards of a government official? Therefore, only nonpopular stalls with sub-par food would be able to earn an A or B grade.”

I was struck by the similarity with many proposal centres. Particularly in larger organisations, it’s not uncommon to find immensely detailed, finely-tuned bid and proposal processes. The governance model will be clearly defined; a barrage of reviews will take place (with teams variously red, blue, orange and more); there’ll be formal project management mechanisms and communications plans. Staff are trained to follow each step religiously; cohorts of administrators schedule the necessary meetings.

But the resulting proposals are dreadful – mediocre, dull, merely ‘complete and compliant’ rather than ’superbly articulating a compelling story’. There’s no spark, no flair, no creativity; no burning desire to produce truly first-class output, no originality, no passion.

It’s almost as if they’re the Singaporean ‘category A’ stalls – sterile environments, creating dull output, providing customers with a mundane solution. They’re so absorbed in the internal process that they forget to look outward, to the customer and the competition, forgetting the very purpose of the proposal centre’s existence as they do.

I recently interviewed a company President. To a question regarding the importance of proposals beyond the sale, he responding, “A well written proposal can be the best training tool a company can offer its employees.” He went on to explain that, within his company, the content was known to be clear, concise, accurate and to present and explain the company and its offerings in the way they wished it to be presented and explained to their customers (and consultants).

Very refreshingly, this particular company President obviously “gets it” when it comes to proposals.

I’m interested in the differences that the 2007 Proposal & Business Development Community survey throws up regarding organisations’ approaches to knowledge bases of pre-written content. This is a one of our pet topics: good proposal centres have strong content libraries, with robust processes in place for keeping material up to date.

Yet many companies find themselves with knowledge bases that simply enable them to write poor proposals faster, full of information that was never especially well-crafted, and is now embarrassingly out-of-date. And people often assume that selecting the software (a Sant, Pragmatech or Proposal Software solution, maybe) is the tough part of the assignment, when building and maintaining the content is the real challenge.

The survey doesn’t ask about quality – after all, it’s quite tough to assess the quality of your own material objectively. But it does ask about maintenance of the knowledge base.

There’s a dead heat between those groups who have a dedicated database administrator, and those whose knowledge base administrator combines that role with other tasks (37% in each camp). The remaining quarter or so of the survey share responsibilities across the group.

That masks some variation by the size of the knowledge base, as you might expect. 45% of teams with over 1,000 records have a dedicated administrator, compared to 27% of those with smaller content libraries.

Yet 56% overall believe that having a dedicated administrator for the knowledge base is critical, and less than 10% believe that such a post is not required.

Where it gets interesting, for me, is when one looks at the teams who are still in the implementation stage. Only 10% of these have a dedicated database administrator. But a staggering 52% believe it’s “absolutely critical” to have such an individual in place. I can feel the pain of their implementations from here.

That said, from our experience more and more organisations aren’t building their libraries from scratch – although doing so can be great fun, and add huge value to the proposal process. Most teams actually find themselves more in the position of needing to resurrect a dying database, refreshing the outdated content and establishing the right processes and responsibilities to ensure that it doesn’t degrade again in future.

I personally don’t like the phrase “administrator” for this role, by the way. It somehow detracts from the strategic importance of this activity. When building a new proposal centre team, the Knowledge Base Manager is one of the key positions, and one of the toughest – requiring real internally ‘organisational savvy’, as well as strong proposal content design and development skills. Mix in some graphics design ability, some technical database skills and a dose of project management, and “administrator” doesn’t begin to do the function justice.

BJ and I are forever seeking out real-world analogies to help us to communicate various perspectives on proposal management. So, having watched the truly fabulous ‘Ratatouille’ last week, my mind’s been hard at work…

A rat went to work as a salesperson.

Erm, maybe not.

There was this rat, see. And it decided to get a job. In procurement.

Nah, it’s not quite working, is it?

If there is a parallel, it’s to provoke an interesting (and perhaps slightly controversial) debate. The rat in the movie has talent: he’s instinctively a great cook, with an amazing sense of smell and taste - who’s then studied with a master chef. And in the proposal world, we’re passionate believers in the importance and power of effective training. Surely it should be a given that everyone working on a proposal has received appropriate training in the necessary skills and techniques?

Yet I’d also argue that the best proposal managers have a set of underlying competencies, without which – no matter how well they’re trained – they will only ever be good, not great. And those aren’t really the mechanical things covered in, say, the APMP Foundation Level syllabus (the “how and when to run a review meeting” type of topic). They’re about interpersonal skills, passion, commitment, professionalism, leadership, empathy, a gift for communication, a commitment to excellence, influencing abilities – techniques which can certainly be refined, but also need to draw on some inherent deep-seated ability.

Actually, I’d go so far as to say that if you give me someone with the right fundamental competencies and mindset, I can teach them the proposal stuff – and (if their organisation has the luxury of a little time, the ability to provide mentoring, and is capable of sheltering them to an extent as they learn) turn them into a top-flight proposal professional: someone who’ll be ‘great’. But if you give me someone who’s been working on proposals for years, but doesn’t have the ‘right stuff’, we’d struggle to get them much beyond ‘good’. And maybe ‘good’ is good enough, in a lot of cases.

Incidentally, I’m guessing that Ratatouille has done wonders for trade for high-end restaurants. I know I for just had to go and find somewhere serving intense, original flavours after seeing the movie. And flavours don’t come much better than at “My Humble House”, the modestly-named Singaporean eaterie that’s recently been voted one of the top 100 restaurants in the world. Highly recommended, if you happen to be in the country!

At the upcoming UK APMP conference (October 10th, 11th, Bournemouth, England) the Strategic Proposal team will be wearing shirts with our logo on them. In preparation for this, Jon sent me a mail requesting that I purchase additional shirts for the newest member of our team. He wrote, “Please add two extra medium polo shirts to the list.”

Though the request was clear to me I wrote back teasing him and stated, “Happy to get the shirts but here in the US we don’t have a size XM (extra medium).”

Now, I realize this was a simple note and I doubt Jon took much time to consider the clarity of it as it certainly didn’t warrant it (besides which, even if he did consider it, he would have concluded I’d know what he meant.) But this does illustrate how wording in a proposal could easily be misunderstood or confusing, right?

So how should/could this be worded to ensure clarity? How about, “When ordering, please add two additional shirts, size medium”? Minor change, much clearer.

I’m sure we all turn up at work in the morning for the sheer love of our jobs, the exhilaration of working on proposals. Our first answer to the age-old debate of “If I won the lottery, I’d…” is always, “continue working on proposals, just like I do today.”

(Any new readers might by now be sensing that this blog is sometimes written just a little tongue in cheek!).

The on-going 2007 Proposal & Business Development community survey posed a question about salary level. Whilst the data’s not definitive, and there are other surveys out there that focus more exclusively on salaries, a population of well over 600 respondents gives some interesting perspectives.

(Shut up, Williams. They just want to know whether you’re going to give them data that’ll help them get a pay rise).

First, let’s break down the responses on salary ranges (excluding other benefits) by bands. The mean is just shy of $80k, but there’s a significant range as one might expect:
* 19% are earning under $50,000 per year
* 41% fall in the $50k - $75k bracket
* 24% earn $50k - $100k
* 11% climb into the $100k - $150k camp
* 5% claim to be on over $150k.

Next up – any significant variation by sector? A little, but not to as huge extent as some might have expected:
- Healthcare/Benefits Admin: $73k
- Finance: $74k
- Technology: $79k

And finally, what about salaries by role? Here goes, for some of the larger camps out there:
- Executives (Director, VP or above): $118k
- Supervisory management (including team leads): $97k
- Management (project, programme, data, content: $78k
- Writer/Editor: $61k
- Analysts, co-ordinators, technicians, specialists: $58k
- Database staff (admin, designer, manager): $54k .

How d’ya fare?! I can picture half of you shrugging your shoulders: “Hey, this data’s a good guide, but it doesn’t reflect the special features of my role.” And the other half – the ones who come in below the averages – will already be plotting to use the data to ask for a rise! I work on 10% commission for any pay rises that readers may negotiate using this data. Payment in fine wine is eminently acceptable

So, here’s an idea. We’re really enjoying the emails we receive from readers, and the requests for comments on particular topics. So, how’s about we take that on to the next logical level?

BJ and I have been chatting, and have come up with the idea of a Readers’ Panel for the blog. Here’s how it would work. We’re after a small number of you (five, six?) to put your names forward as panel members. Every couple of months, we’ll fire through a proposal-related topic to you by email (either one we’ve thought about, or one that other readers have suggested). We’ll canvass your comments, collate your replies, and publish them on the blog.

In return, for panel members? We can’t promise fame and fortune, but we can offer you the chance to participate in interesting debates and to air your views. And you can be confident that if you ever see BJ and I at the bar at a Conference, BJ will buy you a drink :-)

The executive sponsor of a bid that one of our colleagues has been managing circulated a note to the team last week, congratulating them on their work on the proposal that had just been submitted. It started: 

“Dead Team,
 
I just wanted to write to thank you…”

Needless to say, the correction followed close behind:

“I obviously meant ‘Dear’ and not ‘Dead’”

That said, there are times when you’ve worked up to the wire to get the document together when the original phrase may feel just a tad too close to the truth!

I recently worked with a proposal manager whose proposal effort was behind schedule due to missed commitments by members of her team. She had sent out a mail to the team presenting the current status and stating, “I need you to get your pieces to me as soon as possible.” After reading this mail I explained to her that this situation - that being that she was going to have to miss the deadline and/or submit a poor quality response - called for a much more direct approach, and that it was time for her to “swing the bat” (with borrowed authority, in this case from her manager and the CEO, behind it.)

I subsequently wrote a note which I termed a “in no uncertain terms” mail. She tailored this to her project and team and sent it out.

I know many of you face similar challenges in getting team members to meet their deliverable dates, so I’m providing the text of my mail.

The text of my “In no uncertain terms” mail:

Attention all.We are now in serious jeopardy missing the deadline and/or submitting an extremely poor quality proposal due to the significant number of deliverables that are several days past due.

At this point it is highly probable that the response we submit:

- Will present us as being less than competent professionals
- Will not clearly present our solution
- Will not have a clear strategic message
- Will contain incorrect or inaccurate information
- Will be poorly written and contain mistakes
- Will appear to have been written by multiple people rather than one

Missing the deadlines to which you have committed has directly impacted the overall quality of the response we are developing.

These delays have now necessitated reducing the time available for editing, reviewing, edit/review recovery, printing, assembly, quality control checks, and shipping safeguards—all of which are critical to ensuring the quality of our response.

Failure to address this immediately will cause us to have to miss the deadline as submitting a poor quality document as described above presents too great a risk to our company.

Your attention to this is required immediately. Please contact me to provide status of your piece and to discuss how we will ensure your deliverables are successfully met.

Respectfully,

A warning: This note is intended to be used when the project is really off the rails, not for merely reminding people if they are slightly late. Also, this mail needs to be followed up and it will be ineffective if you let team members “call your bluff”.

The good news in this particular case is that this client’s manager and her CEO both followed up.

The CEO’s mail to the team stated, “We ALL agreed that we were going to bid on this project. Bidding does not mean we will forward a half-assed proposal that we are not proud of. I expect everyone to pull their own weigh and ensure that we meet our deliverables. If anyone disagrees with this message or feels they can not comply please let me know immediately.

Some slightly bizarre results in the latest cut of data in the 2007 Proposals & Business Development survey. (Still time to add in your views, if you haven’t done so already). Barbara Esmedina, Chief Survey Goddess, pulled off the results for the groups earning the most (>$400k per year) and least (<$30k annually).

So, the highest earners are the most experienced, most respected and happiest, with the greatest involvement in professional associations such as APMP. Right? Err, no. Of this top-earning group, only a third claim to be respected. Half “hate their job”.

At least they can take comfort from the fact that a third of them don’t personally work directly on proposals or RFPs, presumably leaving that to their minions! So, perhaps it’s no wonder that only over 80% aren’t APMP members.

Yet at the lower earnings end, over half of respondents feel that their job is somewhat or very well-respected. 57% like or love their job. Hey, it must tough at the top!

Now, the sample sizes are pretty small in both cases, I wonder whether one or two folks haven’t answered the questions as accurately as they might have done. And the data is slightly distorted by geography (in that a quarter of the lower earners are in continents where living costs – and hence salaries – are somewhat lower). So although these findings come with a strong health warning, there’s some thought-provoking data nonetheless.

Now, over $400k per year? Time to raise my consulting and training rates. (Joke!)